Poisoned Figs, or “The Traveler’s Religion”: Travel, Trade, and Conversion in Early Modern English Culture

Abstract

In Thomas Nashe’s prose tale, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the young hero, Jack Wilton, journeys to Rome, where he is accused of a double murder he did not commit. He is about to be executed when, at the last moment, he is saved by “a banished English earl,” a noxiously homesick exile who warns young Jack about the dangers, follies, and temptations of travel.¹ As soon as he gets down from the gallows, Jack is eager to be gone in pursuit of a Roman Courtesan, but he is held up when the earl launches into a long and bilious tirade against travel, travelers, and anyone who is not English: “The first traveller was Cain,” says the earl, “and he was called a vagabond and a runnagate on the face of the earth.”² He goes on: “He that is a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.”³ After cataloguing the immorality and folly of every other nation in Europe, the earl finally gives his opinion of English travelers in Italy: “Alas, our Englishmen are the plainest-dealing souls that God ever put life in. … Even as Philemon, a comic poet, died with extreme laughter at the conceit of seeing an ass eat figs, so have the Italians no such sport as to see poor English asses, how soberly they swallow Spanish figs, devour any hook baited for them.”⁴